On Genetics, Race, and Textbooks

Much of the current debate in education focuses on the content of
school curricula and textbooks. What elements of our history and
culture should schools transmit to our children? Is it possible to
embody these cultural and intellectual traditions effectively in
textbooks?

Sound texts prepare students for the world they are about to enter
by reflecting its complexity. Use of such books helps ensure that
schooling is synonymous with education.

Yet textbooks have not always met this standard; they have often
avoided complexity. When books telling incomplete or oversimplified
stories are used, society transmits only a selection of its traditions,
and schooling amounts merely to acculturation.

Interestingly, a lesson about the content of textbooks lies beneath
the surface of the recent controversy over racially charged comments by
the sportscaster Jimmy "the Greek'' Snyder. In this case, the lesson
concerns the selective content that Mr. Snyder and others of his
generation may have learned in school.

Mr. Snyder's suggestion earlier this year that contemporary black
American athletes have benefited from human-breeding programs
supposedly undertaken during the days of slavery implicitly supported a
social program called eugenics. Amid the firestorm of reaction his
televised remarks generated, one may well have wondered how the
commentator came to hold these views. Could he have gleaned such ideas
from his textbooks?

The term "eugenics'' was coined by the British scientist Sir Francis
Galton in 1883. For Galton and his followers, human beings could best
improve their lot through the manipulation of heredity.

In what was to become known as the nature-versus-nurture debate, the
eugenicists were radical naturalists. Believing that nurture accounted
for little in human performance, they argued that the less able members
of society should make way for those with hereditary advantage. The
movement was associated in politics with immigration restriction,
segregation and sterilization, and programs of human breeding.

What of its presence in school textbooks?

The findings from my review of biology texts in the U.S. Education
Department's library archive are striking. Of 49 biology textbooks
published between 1914 and 1949, more than 90 percent included eugenics
as legitimate content.

Human worth, these books argued, ran in families, and inherited
traits--for good or for evil--dictated the behavior of individuals. The
texts warned their high-school readers to choose their mates and
careers in light of these alleged facts.

This is bad biology: It ignores the complexity of human development,
which is based on nurture as well as nature.

Even more significant is the fact that more than 75 percent of these
texts supported programs of positive eugenics for society's most able
members, while more than 45 percent backed the practice of negative
eugenics for those judged inferior. That is, they strongly supported
programs of human breeding.

Perhaps some of those who today speak favorably of such programs are
simply reflecting what they learned in school in the 1930's. Yet even
at that time, not everyone agreed on the feasibility of such
breeding.

As the noted anthropologist Ashley Montagu, now at Princeton
University, noted in the early 1940's, such programs were doomed to
failure on the grounds of genetics.

"Were every feebleminded individual to be sterilized for the next
2,000 years,'' he explained, "the reduction in the number of
feebleminded individuals in the population at the end of that time
would not exceed 50 percent.''

And, he concluded, that "is a very long time to have to wait for
such a return.''

Indeed, by the 1920's, geneticists had recognized the remarkable
complexity of most human qualities and had rejected eugenics on
technical grounds. Even if slave owners had tried to breed their human
property, as Mr. Snyder suggested, genetics and time were not with
them.

Yet one could counter that Mr. Snyder and his like-minded classmates
are simply products of bad biology textbooks--that they have failed to
follow changes in the theories of genetics.

As a consequence, they have come to believe that one could easily
breed for, say, superior muscular development in the legs of
blacks--what Mr. Snyder referred to as the "thigh situation.'' If this
erroneous thinking were the only issue under consideration, then Mr.
Snyder could be judged as little more than an intellectual innocent. A
sad conclusion, but not a chargeable offense.

But another implication in his remarks is far more serious: the
transforming of performance differences between individual athletes
into racial differences. And this racial interpretation is not to be
found in any of the textbooks in question.

Such views are not new, however. When raised earlier in this
century, they were powerfully rejected at that time by members of the
scientific community.

A classic study refuting the notion of such racial differences was
published by W. Montagu Cobb of Howard University in 1936. The
specifics of the case are strikingly similar to those of the Snyder
controversy. In the 1930's, the issue was not thighs and race, but
sprinting or running ability and race. And some members of the press,
Mr. Cobb noted, had charged that "the current success of American Negro
sprinters and broad jumpers ... [was] in some way ... due to racial
characteristics.''

Mr. Cobb proposed to evaluate the charge by physically measuring the
most famous black American athletes of the time, including Jesse Owens,
and comparing them with white athletes. If the newspapers were right,
Mr. Owens and the others should have possessed physical characteristics
that distinguished them as blacks. They did not.

"There is not a single physical characteristic,'' Mr. Cobb
concluded, "which all the Negro stars in question have in common which
would definitely identify them as Negroes.''

In the case of Mr. Owens, the findings were again clear. "Jesse
Owens, who has run faster and leaped farther than a human being has
ever done before,'' Mr. Cobb concluded, "does not have what is
considered the Negroid type of calf, foot, and heel bone.''

The race thinkers were wrong in 1936, and they are wrong today.
Short-term breeding programs do not account for human differences on
the playing field.

Fortunately, theories of eugenics have been discredited by science
and are not found in current texts.

Subject though it is to prejudices, the human mind can change
through an education that confronts human complexity. The good news is
that the content to counter misconceptions about race is now available.
It's in the best of today's textbooks.

Steven Selden is an associate professor in the department of
education policy, planning, and administration at the University of
Maryland. He is writing a book on the links between the eugenics
movement and American education in the early 20th century.

Vol. 07, Issue 26, Page 24

Published in Print: March 23, 1988, as On Genetics, Race, and Textbooks

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